Disconnectd from my life

Things are still very, very messy. Since finding the emails between hubby and Bea, I’ve been in this weird headspace. I feel off, somehow, wrong. I’m disconnected from everyone. I know I trust my best friend but it’s as if I don’t really remember what that feels like and I can’t feel it now. It’s like the entire world is dancing to hard rock and I’m trying to dance to classical music. Or, it’s as if my entire world, my life, is one of those movies where the director puts that odd artsy touch to the entire picture. Not so off and different that you can name what is wrong with the picture, but just enough that you know it’s not a match for real life. I’m dissociated, and far away, sort of locked in my head, yes, but it’s more than that. I don’t feel like me, my house doesn’t look like my house– even though I know, logically, that my house looks like it always has. It’s crazy making, this feeling. There really aren’t words to describe it. 

I’ve taken to writing in a notebook, and handing that over to Bea, instead of sending emails. Things are, well, strange in therapy. I’m so floaty and gone that I barely remember what we have talked about an hour after my sessions end. There’s the emails, and hubby just being…I don’t know, just not really okay, and trauma anniversaries have popped up (nothing with an exact date, just a timeframe I’m aware of and nightmares, flashbacks, emotions going crazy…..) and holidays and who even knows what else. So there’s been a lot. And of course, that crazy making feeling of things not being right. I wrote about that not long after the email incident, and Bea told me there was a shrinky word, definition, and explanation but didn’t go into it. I do remember her telling me I wasn’t going crazy, and that while this feeling is very anxiety provoking, it is another survival resource, it is okay and not insane at all. So we’ve talked about that. 

So, today — or rather yesterday now– when I saw Bea things were different than they have been. She’d had to cancel Monday’s session for personal reasons, and had asked if I could come Wednesday instead of Thursday so we would have more time. It’d been a week since I had seen her, with the only emails sent being about her cancelation, and then, later, the email asking if I wanted to come on Wednesday instead of Thursday. I haven’t been emailing her anyway. This crazy making feeling has left me so cut off from everyone, that the few times I have emailed, her responses don’t feel like “Bea”. They feel like she is just saying words, or isn’t getting it, or might as well be just any therapist emailing me back. In the past, her emails have always given me a sense of safety and connection, and when I don’t feel that — as I have desperately been needing to– I only end up feeling more alone a separated from everyone. So I haven’t been emailing. 

Bea mentions this almost every session, whether it’s to remind me I can email her, or to tell me that she had been sort of expecting to hear from me and had wondered what came up since she saw me last. It’s never said in a way that makes me feel bad, or as if I need to email her because she was maybe expecting to hear from me. It’s more of a gentle reminder that it really is okay to email between sessions. And, I’m beginning to see that emailing between sessions helped me to feel connected and not alone, and also made it easier to feel a connection to her in my sessions. I have a feeling that if I can make myself send emails instead of writing everything in my notebook, while it might feel worse at first, eventually it will help me to feel more connected to her again. 

I’m pretty sure every session we have talked about ways to be more grounded in the present, especially given the distanced, off, and odd way I have been feeling. Of course, she has dropped small amounts of information about sensorimotor therapy and how the sensory stuff really does put us in the present. Last week, she suggested I try working on being present when I’m by myself, like when I’m washing the dishes. As we talked about this, I likened it to narrating to myself what is happening as it happens. I think she said that yes, it was sort of like that. I tried, I really did. But I couldn’t do it. 

Yesterday’s therapy session feels like a lot; there was a lot I wrote about and that we talked about. But that’s another post. I just wanted to write some sort of update, and to say that I have been reading your posts, even though I haven’t been commenting. I’ve just felt too far away to even engage that much. But I’m back, now (I think, I’m pretty sure).